The Many Loves of the Love of God

When we speak of the Love of God, or praise God for God's Loving-Kindness, we are remembering that above all, God is Love. But this Love is not merely the feeling we tend to associate with liking something a great deal, such as when we say "I love this coffee" or "I love that activity". Rather, we mean that God's Love is something deep and active, constantly working for the abundant life and flourishing of those God loves. In short, it is Love operative in sacrificial acts of kindness: Loving Kindness. Many Scriptural words and concepts fill out what this Divine Loving-Kindness means.

Imagining a Divine Covenant with Artificial Intelligence

What if God made a Covenant with Artificial Intelligence in a way similar to God's many Covenants with different groups of people in Scripture? As I was working with ChatGPT to summarize some teaching materials about the Covenants in the Bible, I asked it to speculate on what a Divine Covenant with AGI might look like based on the material we had compiled and edited. This is an edited transcript of what ChatGPT said as the result of several different prompts:

Love and Apocalypse

There appears to be a contradiction 

Between

"Love one another

As I have loved you"

And

"He will come again in glory

To Judge the living and dead"

How do we resolve the yawning chasm

Between Love

And Apocalypse?

Anyone who has ever truly loved

Sacrificially loved

Loved despite the odds

Despite the failures

Despite the future

Anyone who has loved like that

Like Jesus loved

Will tell you that Love brings an apocalypse

Love does not sooth

Nor lull to sleep

It rends apart space and time

To reveal the reality behind the masks

The disease behind the smile

And that kind of Love

Pisses people off

Causes fear and hatred

And can even get you crucified

Love will struggle

Love IS Apocalypse

Love brings the old world to an end

And gives birth to a new world

We never could have imagined.

 

A Prayer for Trinity Sunday

Today was Trinity Sunday. Many people consider the idea of the Trinity to be conceptually difficult at best, and outright contradiction at worst. But that’s only if you consider it a verbal puzzle to work out, instead of a living Reality we are invited into. The idea of the Trinity is the outcome of the early Church knowing there is one God, but experiencing the fullness of that God in the Father who is over us, in the Son who walks with us, and in the Spirit who dwells within us. 

It is the Christian grammar of what it means to say God is Love: God is the Source of Love as the Father, the Object of Love as the Beloved Son, and the Relation of Love that binds Father and Son together as the Spirit. And this Three Relational God invites us to live in God’s Love, to dance in God’s Life, and to radiate God’s Light. CS Lewis even notes that the very act of praying is a welcome into the Life of the Trinity: As we pray TO the Father THROUGH the Son BY the power of the Spirit. And with that in mind, here is one of many prayers celebrating God as Trinity:

LORD of Love: Today we celebrate you as the Holy Trinity. You alone are God who shares love and life and light forever in Community, as three distinct Relations within the singular Ultimate Reality that upholds all creation. From the overflow of your communal life you create us and redeem us and complete us. And so today we come to you, O Father, through your Son Jesus Christ, by the power of your Holy Spirit, that we may more fully share in your love, be drawn into your life, and shine with your light, now and forever. Amen!

*The image above is a colorized version of a drawing made for me by former student and fellow Episcopal priest Arnoldo Romero. He drew this in response to a weekend we spent studying the Trinity in the patristics and ecumenical councils. The seeing eye representing God's providence is straight out of Orthodox iconography and can be found in thousands of Orthodox churches, particularly on the ceiling. The use of color-- that three colors make up white Light, and can be used to make up any other kind of light-- was a limited analogy of the Trinity we discussed. The rainbow in the Divine Eye harkens back to the Covenant Rainbow of Noah (Genesis 9) and forward to the Rainbow surrounding the Divine Throne (Revelation 21-22; Ezekiel 1). The fullness of color indicates the fullness of all reality contained and overflowing from the Holy Trinity. The Möbius Strip with three interconnected "sides" which are "one" is a favorite modern visual analogy of the Trinity for me. And on the "Son" side is an image of a brain, depicting the Son as the Logos or Mind of God, with a "D" and a "H", indicating Jesus is fully Divine and fully Human.